"O Lithuania, My Homeland..."

This week in COMM 199 we're seeing a pair of films from perhaps THE most prolific and important director in Polish film, and a celebrated auteur in the realm of what we lovingly refer to as "global cinema": Andrzej Wajda. This weekend, we'll screen his canonic Ashes and Diamonds (1958), his third film, and the completion of his "WWII war trilogy." First, though, we're starting with a more recent film set nearly two centuries ago, Pan Tadeusz (1999). Though they're made over four decades apart, with wildly different geo-political and industrial contexts for their productions, both films are dealing with Polish statehood and national identity.

Perhaps not surprisingly, though, things can start to get complicated once you get underneath the surface a little. Consider the opening line of Adam Mickiewicz's epic poem upon which the film is adapted:

O Lithuania, my country, thou

Art like good health; I never knew till now

How precious, till I lost thee. Now I see

Thy beauty whole, because I yearn for thee.

For some, this couplet points to the Polish-Lithuanian union which existed in what we commonly call the Middle Ages, until the partitions of Poland that forced this part of the world to become a part of Czarist Russia from 1795-1918. It's remembering a state of the nation that no longer exists (note that both Tadeusz and Ashes chronicle nobly doomed attempts to reassert independent Polish statehood). But as is alluded to in the end of Pan Tadeusz (with a discussion about serf emancipation), the reassertion of Poland and Polish rule over the land puts the Poles back as colonial rulers in their own right. Lithuanians might hear this opening couplet from Mickevičius (as he's know in Lithuanian) and have their own sense of this country that they lost time and again...